


Like the Knight Loves the Queen

by scioscribe



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1950s, Crimes & Criminals, F/F, Historical, noir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-08
Packaged: 2018-09-22 23:42:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9630167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Long live the living till they go straight to hell.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



People used to say Kate only took over because her father was a soft touch who wanted to retire to Miami, sit on the roof of some chalk-white hotel and sun himself like a lizard, and he didn’t have any sons and he didn’t have any nephews and all the men around him, the tough guys with their hatchet faces and gimlet gazes, had watched her grow up from a kid and couldn’t bear to topple her. People used to say that, but they never said it more than once. Rose made sure of that even when Kate didn’t.

Kate had plucked Rose up from the perfume counter at a department store: she liked to say she came in for hyacinth and left with Rose. Rose said that was just a line. “She’s straight Chanel No. 5. No hyacinth. Rose and jasmine.”

One day this card asked her what would happen when Kate found a girl named Jasmine.

“Some pretty girl at a glove counter,” he said.

Rose smiled a smile that opened up just like a straight razor. “Jasmine wouldn’t stay pretty for too long.”

They were an open secret that way.

For the littlest bit of time at the beginning of things, they were even an open secret to themselves. Kate had lured Rose out from behind that glassed-in counter with its rows of crystal bottles and jewel-toned atomizers just by leaning against it. She’d had this heavy man’s watch on and the links had scratched the glass. She went into the oh-I’m-so-sorry dance just because those nice stores have the steps for it already painted heel-toe on the floor and Kate’s whole approach was to be a lady.

But Rose just said, “On glass there’s a celebrity discount, Miss Hiller.”

Kate looked at her, this nice girl with her carefully lined lips and the little white scar under her eye, this working girl in her pastel cardigan and neat polka-dotted dress. Girls who clocked out every day at six sharp weren’t supposed to know Kate Hiller by sight and they sure as hell weren’t supposed to turn pink just looking at her. Rose, Kate thought, was something new. She left with that girl like she'd gotten her gift-wrapped and Rose never went back.

Rose did, though, slip a square and checkered bottle of cologne in her purse on the way to the door, because what bad thing could happen to her while she was on Kate’s arm?

The cologne was called Chess, and it wasn’t that night or the next night or even the night after that when they had their talk about it, though Rose was sleeping in Kate’s apartment all that while, wearing Kate’s green silk pajamas and her peacock-colored robe. Men came to see Kate that week and left feeling like some steam in the room had unstarched their collars.

Kate had a chess set left over from her father, who’d been a man with no imagination except for where his daughter’s future was concerned. She started trying to teach Rose to play, but Rose couldn’t keep the names of the pieces straight. She wasn’t stupid, but lust and Chanel No. 5 had all but soaked into the wallpaper and the velvet of the ottomans by then and nobody could have learned a damn thing in that place.

But it made her feel young and feeling young made her feel flustered, so to forestall their tenth talk on how the bishops moved in their inexorable diagonals, she started talking about fate. How fortuitous it was that Kate liked chess and Rose had taken that cologne.

“Why cologne?” Kate said, after Rose had produced the bottle and sprayed a puff or two in the air for them. “Not that it doesn’t smell good, honey. Like musk and linen.”

“I like how it trips,” Rose said. “The notes are almost heavy enough for it to be a perfume, but they don’t get there. But most men won’t wear it. Most women won’t either. Something that no one else is doing has to be either stupid or courageous or both.”

“And what were you feeling? Stupid or courageous or—”

Rose said, “Both.”

“Here,” Kate said, picking up the bottle, holding the amber stopper as delicately as if _that_ were the rose she wanted to pluck. “Let me make you an in-between kind of girl.” She painted stripes of musk and linen, of Chess, along the insides of Rose’s wrists under the wide, flapping sleeves of the peacock robe. In the hollow of Rose’s throat, with her chin raised, her pulse exposed and quickening.

Then they went back to sitting on the floor, nylons and bare shins rubbing against cream-colored carpet, and Kate picked up a black knight.

“The knight moves in an L,” she said, and demonstrated.

Rose, her temples pounding a little with all the sticky cologne in the air, asked how the hell she was supposed to remember that.

“It’s L for love,” Kate said. “It’s all about the queen. About chivalry. The king’s limp as a dishrag, he’s on his last legs, he just inches around waiting to get captured, but the queen’s the one, baby. She glides whichever way she wants and however far she wants and the knight watches. The knight loves her. So the knight keeps trying to say it. L, L, L.”

It was early for L but neither of them was a king, inclined to move in cautious inches, and that night ended with the peacock robe on the floor and Rose on her back on top of it, her pajama top unbuttoned and pushed roughly to each side, all of her bare below the waist. Kate tracing L shapes on her belly and thighs with her fingers and on her cunt with her tongue, which was, she said, no way to do things. But they accomplished their purposes well enough eventually: round, well-muscled thighs straddling each other and rubbing up in a sheen of sweat and sweet soft talcum powder. The chess pieces got knocked every which way.

The black knight resurfaced two years later in a package wrapped in brown paper. Wrapped in a bloodied handkerchief.

It got delivered to Kate at the wrap-around bar of Fletcher’s All-Nite Casino, where Kate’s name appeared on no paperwork and she drank for free.

The bartender, a fellow whose freckles had escaped onto his hands as well as his cheeks, a fellow who knew things about open secrets, said, “Rosebud’s?”

“That your nickname for her now, Pete?” Kate said without looking up from that box. “What I want to know is who is who thought this would be a good idea. Somebody with more balls than sense.”

Of course, somebody with sense wouldn’t have taken Kate Hiller’s right-hand girl. Somebody with sense wouldn’t have grabbed anybody any Sicilian ever called Switchblade Rosie out of her own apartment with her own gear to hand. Somebody with sense would have just sent that little mounted-on-linen bloodstain and never-minded asking Rose for a thing that’d double-quick prove it was her. It all could have been handled like they were all smart people, civilized people. Kate had done it a few times herself, with the wives and girlfriends of her rivals. Always take her from a public place, don’t invade the home, don’t spoil anything. The women knew the score, too: the last one Kate had taken, with the politest nudge of her little pearl-handled derringer at the small of her back, had just sighed and asked if they could stop by the drugstore on the way so she could get a box of chocolates and a bottle of soda pop so she could at least spoil her complexion while she waited. Kate had said sure.

Public places. No force but the suggestion of force, for appearance’s sake. Be polite. Sit the lady somewhere anonymous but comfortable. And notify with a phone call and a clear, reasonable demand: pull back from the gambling business, stop interfering with that joint getting its liquor license, leave the pinball racket alone, tell that son-of-a-bitch he’s not collecting a red cent off that fixed horse race. Let them talk to the dame, who’d be calm. Everybody and everything all professional as hell.

It wouldn’t have looked a thing like this.

Even Pete thought so, and Pete was just a bartender with tight lips, just a swish with a steady hand, not even in the game: “It’s sloppy, Kate.”

She nodded, and it would be a misnomer to say she was already thinking it over because she hadn’t ever stopped thinking in her whole life. “I know what sloppy looks like when I see it around. I never could stand mess near me, and I think somebody’s taken offense at me not paying enough to keep it away.” She closed the box. “Hold onto the take tonight for me, Pete. I have a castle to storm.”

* * *

“You’re making a mistake,” Rose said once her nose stopped bleeding. It wasn’t like she couldn’t have talked before, but she’d been too irritated to try: a quick pop and it’ll all be over, the guy had promised before bloodying her, like she was some kid waiting for a shot. They hadn’t deserved a warning and they still didn’t.

She guessed there was still enough of that perfume counter girl with her knee-length skirts and her pink bubblegum mouth to think law and order was entitled to some special treatment.

Because they were cops, the men who’d taken her. She recognized all of them, and there wasn’t any reason not to, not when she’d sat on the bottle-green velvet pouf at Kate’s feet not three weeks ago, filing her nails and listening to them wheedle for an increase in their pay-off.

“We don’t have to do this in front of the girl,” the skinny one finally said. Weir. “I don’t like talking shop in front of—”

“A woman?” Kate said. She uncrossed her legs, silky calf gliding down silky thigh. “I think you boys are forgetting who you’re talking to.”

“Dammit, Kate—”

“Rose hears what I hear. If you all get so distracted thinking about two women, why don’t you just think about us as one—one mouth, one set of ears, one set of eyes.”

“I wouldn’t take advice from her on anything,” the good-looking one, Erickson, said. He had one of those big square jaws like some funny-papers hero, but he was the one who would end up, three weeks later, nearly breaking Rose’s nose: a quick pop and then over. She bet that was what he told his girlfriends, too. He had that kind of honeyed smirk that said he figured mentioning his limitations was the same as overcoming them. “Didn’t I hear you found her bagging groceries or something like that?”

“I sold razors,” Rose said. Every time somebody asked her, if she didn’t want to tell them, she said something different. “Straight razors and strops, for men who don’t know how close a shave they’re already getting.”

“That’s cute,” the third one said. He didn’t look like anything, but not looking like anything was one hell of a distinctive way to look. His name was Roby. “Wordplay. Does she do any other tricks, Kate?”

“No,” Rose said, standing up. “But you do. And you can show one of them off right now, officers: roll over. Kate’s made herself clear.”

“I bet it was cigarettes at the ballpark,” Roby said. “What you sold, before you started selling your ass to some rich dyke.”

Rose hadn’t cut him that night because Kate had stopped her, but she’d cut him when he’d come to grab her; that was why Erickson had bloodied her nose. Rose almost thought well of him for that even though he was still a son-of-a-bitch: she liked loyalty.

Roby: bleeding all over her carpet like it was his job.

Erickson: adding her blood to the mix.

Weir: dumb enough to ask her what he should send to Kate as a sign they’d got her. (She’d almost rolled her eyes and asked if the three of them all put together still didn’t know their letters well enough to write a damn note.)

So, all right, the knight. Kate would know what it meant. That Rose still had her head on her shoulders to think with, that she loved her, all that sentimental jazz. More importantly: that this was another game that was going to end with the two of them sweeping the board clean and fucking on top of it. Tell her she wasn’t a romantic.

“We aren’t making a mistake,” Erickson said now. “We’ve got your boss on a string. Heel, bitch, heel.”

“That would be a leash, not a string,” Rose said. “Seems like you don’t know how to manage any kind of bitch, do you?” She turned to Roby. “I got you pegged as the smart one, so how about I only talk to you? And how about I get a cigarette? You know, the kind you said I must have sold at the ballpark once upon a time—and I did, as a matter of fact, when I was seventeen. So we’re simpatico.”

He gave her a nothing kind of smile and lit a smoke for her.

“My hero. Here’s what you have to know, boys: if you make Kate Hiller leave the All-Nite when all she wants is a Tom Collins and to win a few bucks off herself at the penny slots, not a single one of you is getting out of here alive.”

“Bullshit,” Roby said. “Three cops versus one dame.”

“Three criminals,” Rose said, “versus a fourth criminal, when the fourth’s the only one who can buy up casinos and pretty girls. And you might as well say versus a fifth, because I’m here, too.”

“You don’t count,” Erickson said.

“I think you’re the ones who can’t count. Who can keep up with this scoreboard of yours? How much money you want, how many gangsters you’re in bed with, how many people are real enough to figure into things. Do yourselves a favor and turn me loose. You’re getting your handouts, first of every month, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re luxurious enough already. She’s so careful she barely needs the help. All the time I’m telling her, ‘Kate, you be queen all you want, but sometimes you’ve at least got to turn your knights loose to have some fun,’ but she calls me impatient.”

“She should say you talk too much.”

Rose smiled. “She has ways of shutting me up.”

“Yeah, we do too,” Weir said, like that was his big comeback moment, the one where the camera would turn to him and the audience would fall in love and he’d at least be Edward G. Robinson if he couldn’t be Bogie. “It’s called a gag.”

“Your funeral,” Rose said. She leaned back and smoked her cigarette.

It took two more cigarettes and an Old Fashioned and then Kate came for her. Rose had known it would be pretty quick. Hadn’t Kate herself taught her that? The queen could move all those spaces in a single glide.

Rose had her drink, so she just sat back and sipped it while the shots went off, and by the time there was something that seemed to need her intervention—kicking the gun Erickson had dropped away from Roby's questing hand—all she had left was the cocktail cherry. She took it off the stem with her teeth at the same time as the toe of her shoe collided with the butt of the pistol and that, she would tell people later, was called synchronicity. She would tell the story a lot and it would always be inseparable, to her, from the pop of that cherry in her mouth and the sick red taste of it. Some part of her still was the perfume counter girl after all.

Kate fired one more time, putting an end to Roby, and then she looked at Rose. Her hair was just the littlest bit askew and one of them—Weir, maybe, and who’d have thought that?—had gotten close enough to tear one of the buttons off her cuff trying to grapple with her. She had high spots of color in her face and her lips had gone just a little pale even with the dark liner around them. She looked like she’d about been worried sick, and Rose tried to remember that along with the taste of the cherry.

She took her foot off Roby’s hand and went to Kate and kissed her. “Gunfire and gin,” she said. “I’d know you blindfolded.”

“I wouldn’t know you. I never knew you for the brandy type.”

“I told them whiskey, but did they listen? Not bad this way, though.” She put her head against the side of Kate’s neck and breathed in Chanel No. 5 and, fresher, overlaying it, Chess: musk and linen. “I ought to tell everybody about this sentimental streak of yours.”

“And I’ll tell everybody your hands are shaking,” Kate said, which Rose hadn’t even noticed. Kate kissed her fingers one by one, steadying them. “Aren’t we a pair.” She pushed Rose’s skirt up an inch or two higher on her thighs, running her thumb across Rose’s skin past where her stockings stopped. “Long live the living, that’s what I say, baby girl. Isn’t that right?”

“Long live the living till we go straight to hell,” Rose agreed. Heat spread up and down her, like Kate was starting a fire, dragging steel along flint instead of just moving her hand further and further up. She had the feeling she’d go off like a torched fireworks stand if it went on any longer. She already felt a hot heaviness between her legs, a pressure only Kate could ease for her, a burden only Kate could take up. But she tilted her head. “Sirens.”

“Sure, sweetheart. This much gunplay, someone had to call the cops.”

Rose pulled back. “What’s our story? Where do we head to?”

“We sit down,” Kate said. “Maybe you show me how an Old Fashioned tastes with brandy instead of whiskey. Maybe you tell me which one of them roughed up your face so I can break his nose for fairness’s sake, dead or not.” She put her hand on Rose’s breast and rubbed, hard enough for Rose to moan. “Or maybe we go to the bedroom, though I can’t promise it’ll look any better than out here. If they paid these boys well, they wouldn’t stick their hands out so far they burned their fingers. Sheets so rough they scratch your skin, I bet you anything.”

“You want to get caught?”

Kate smiled at her, her lips hard. She had been doing this for a long time—years before Rose had ever even met her.

(“But I never had another girl like you,” she’d told Rose once. “Girls like you don’t come around more than once in a lifetime.”)

Kate said, “Who do you think called them? Now, these ones I’ll have to pay more, but they’ll be worth it. Write that down, Rose: men who will help you with murders are worth more than men who will only help you with money. And that’ll be a lesson for you if you ever want your own gig.”

“No,” Rose said. “I’d never want to be away from you.”

“Like the knight loves the queen, baby?”

Rose listened to the sirens getting closer and closer. She said, “It’s the only damn move I ever learned,” and she got down on her knees and rucked Kate’s dress up and pressed her mouth against her. L and L and L. She thought she could get Kate off before the men opened the door; she liked a challenge. She licked the taste of cherry up into the taste of cunt and thought, _Long live the living till we go straight to hell._


End file.
